The Serpent of Venice Read Free Page A

best I could, at the owl-horking obviousness of his folly. (Shrugging comprised my entire repertoire of gesture, as my hands were chained through a heavy ring in the wall above my head. I did not hang, but neither could I sit. If I pulled the chain to its exact balance point, I suppose I could have flapped my hands at the end of their shackles, but I had no story to go with the flapping.)
    The senator chuckled and resumed troweling mortar for the next row of bricks. “We’re below the level of the lagoon. I could torture you to death and no one would hear you scream. But I prefer to go to my bed and fall into slumber wrapped in the sweet dream of your suffering in the dark, dying slowly.”
    “Ha! See there. I thought myself dead when I drank your poison, so for my money, I’m ahead of the game.”
    “You weren’t poisoned. It was a potion from farthest China—brought overland at great expense. It was already in your glass.” He reached into his robe and held up a small red-lacquered box.
    “Not poisoned?” said I. “A shame. I was enjoying my resurrection. I had hoped to come back taller, but then tall as well as roguishly handsome would be gilding the lily, wouldn’t it.”
    “Would you like to wager on how long you might last? Two—three days, perhaps? Oh, that’s right, you can’t wager, can you? You have nothing.”
    “True,” said I. “Yet you see a victory in what is a simple truth for all of us, is it not? We have nothing, we are nothing.” The truth was, I had been nothing, felt nothing but longing and grief, since news of my sweet Cordelia’s death from fever had reached me three months ago. I did not fear death, nor even pain. I’d never have come to Brabantio’s palazzo if I had. That last moment, when I thought myself poisoned, I’d been relieved.
    “Well, you are nothing. Would that you realized that before you brought ruin upon my daughter.”
    “Portia? Oh, she’s not ruined. Bit sore, perhaps—might be walking a bit gingerly for a day or two from the rug burns, but she’s far from ruined. Think of her not as ruined, but simply as well used.”
    Brabantio growled, then, red faced, he thrashed his head in the portal like a dirt-eating loony. (I thought he might burst a vein in his ancient forehead.) He seemed unable to form any retort but steam and spittle, which I took as cue to continue.
    “Like a new pair of boots,” I said, Brabantio’s potion having made me especially chatty. “Like new boots you might wear into the water, so that even while enduring the squish and slop of them for a while, they cure to a perfect fit, molded, as it were, by experience, to receive you and only you. At which point you have to throw them over a chair and have raucously up the bum!”
    “No!” barked the senator, at which point he flung a brick at me that would have taken a kneecap had I not quickly pulled myself up by the chains. The brick thudded off the wall and splashed somewhere in the dark.
    “The strained-boot metaphor what sent you round the bend, then?” said I, a jolly jingle of my chains for levity. “You’re short a brick now, you know? You’ve bollixed up the whole bloody edifice over a smidge o’ literary license, thou thin-skinned old knob-gobbler.”
    “Tis my eldest, Desdemona, that’s ruined,” said the senator, pressing his point by placing a brick atop the wall.
    “Oh, well, yes, but I can’t take credit for that,” said I. And I was, of course, lying about his younger daughter. I’d never so much as been alone in a room with Portia. “No, Desdemona’s downfall is all Othello’s doing.”
    Another brick joined its red brothers in line. Only the senator’s face was visible above them now.
    “And but for your interference, he would be gone—or condemned, if I’d had my way. But no, you were in the ear of the doge like a gnat, making a case for your precious Moor, talking of Venice’s debt to him, spouting rhymes of how he was some noble hero instead of a